Causative Spatial Expressions in Finnish and Swedish.

This article deals with some language-specific differences in Finnish and Swedish when expressing spatial causation. The focus is on the Finnish causative motion verbs piilottaa ('hide') and hakea ('fetch'), which refer to a causation of spatial events: hiding or fetching causes something (or someone) to move along a path in direction to or from some place. Syntactic-semantic differences between the languages are explained as conceptual phenomena. The formal lexical descriptions made are therefore based on the framework of conceptual semantics. In Finnish the causative motion verbs piilottaa and hakea are both conceptualized as a path of the Theme's movement, whereas the Swedish counterparts gömma and hämta are conceptualized as a location of the Theme after (gömma) respectively before (hämta) its movement. Through the theory of temporal structure, the language-specific differences can be explained through temporal relations within conceptual structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]